Appeal No. 2001-0078
Application No. 08/892,131
evidence. The court has also recently expanded their reasoning
on this topic in In re Thrift, 298 F.3d 1357, 1364, 63 USPQ2d
2002, 2006-07 (Fed. Cir. 2002).
Accordingly, since the Examiner has not established a prima
facie case of obviousness, the rejection of independent claim 1
and its dependent claims 2 and 3, as well as independent claim
13, is not sustained.
We also do not sustain the Examiner’s obviousness rejection
of dependent claims 6 and 15 directed to the feature of heat
sealing the cap to the shell. The Examiner suggests (Answer,
pages 9 and 10) that the selection of a particular method for
attaching a cap to a shell would be considered “a common
practice” for a designer depending on a particular application,
and further that heat sealing provides “a quick assembly of the
cartridge so that manufacturing cost would be reduced . . . . ”
As with our misgivings expressed above with regard to the
Examiner’s rejection of claims 1-3 and 13, we find no evidentiary
support on the record that would support these conclusions of the
Examiner.
Turning to a consideration of the Examiner’s obviousness
rejection of claims 4 and 5, we note that while we found
Appellant’s arguments to be persuasive with respect to the
7
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007